Sam Claflin

Sam Claflin has managed to fit in some quality downtime in London before rejoining his game-making friends on the American set of the third and fourth installments of the Hunger Games series: burgers and beer in his favorite pub; time with his actress wife Laura Haddock; and soccer with his London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art friends. The 27-year-old actor spent three months on a diet of chicken and asparagus to prepare for the role of fourth-district ex-champion Finnick Odair in Catching Fire, the second entry in the dystopian teen epic, which is due out this month. “The pressure was on,” admits Claflin. “I hadn’t read the books, but I did my research online. I won’t lie—I read a few of the comments made about them casting me, too.” Luckily, Claflin fit right in during filming in Hawaii and Atlanta, working alongside newly minted Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence and actress Jena Malone, who plays her new sidekick. “I’ve worked with my fair share of powerful women, but I feel that those two in particular are my sisters now,” says Claflin, who is becoming somewhat of a regular in big-budget franchise films, having appeared in both 2011’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman. But Claflin, who admires the careers of fellow Brits Tom Hardy and Michael Fassbender, wants to avoid being pigeonholed and is excited by two other projects he squeezed in between camping it up with the rulers of Capitol: the indie romance Love, Rosie with Lily Collins; and the riotous Oxford University drama Posh. For now, though, Claflin is enjoying the pop primitivism of the world Suzanne Collins created. “One day we were fighting some imaginary monkeys in this lake in the middle of Hawaii, when suddenly Jennifer let out this god almighty scream,” he recalls. “She thought something had bit her in the bum. As it turns out, my trident whipped her in the ass.”